Private Suits Under Washington\u27s Consumer Protection Act: The Public Interest Requirement

This comment discusses the current state of the law in the area of private remedies for unfair business practices and focuses on two questions: (1) Is the public interest requirement for private suits under the Act justified? (2) What are the appropriate tests for finding an effect on the public interest? The comment concludes that the statutory purpose and historical context justify the public interest requirement but that the Washington courts have not yet developed a sufficiently specific test for determining when the requirement has been met. A specific test is therefore suggested to fulfill the appropriate function of the private remedy. The proposed test requires the presence of (1) unequal bargaining power, (2) solicitation or public offering, and (3) the probability of repetition of the transaction which forms the basis of the complaint. This three-part test explains the results in the Washington cases and adheres to the proper scope of the private remedy. The specificity of this test should aid both courts and private litigants in their determination whether a given transaction sufficiently affects the public interest to bring it within the Act\u27s protection

Are Long-Period Exoplants Around Cool Stars More Common Than We Thought?

The Kepler mission has been the catalyst for discovery of nearly 5,000 confirmed and candidate exoplanets. The majority of these candidates orbit Sun-like stars, and have orbital periods comparable to or shorter than that of the Earth, due to the selection bias inherent in the transit method and the limitations of automated transit search algorithms. We aim to develop a richer understanding of the population of exoplanets around the lowest-mass stars, the M spectral type. We are particularly interested in exoplanets with long orbital periods, which are difficult or impossible to find using standard transit search algorithms. In our study, we develop a unique methodology using the novel Planet Hunters citizen science project in conjunction with a new searching/scoring pipeline, SATCHEL, constructed from scratch to handle crowd-sourced time-series photometry. With the results from SATCHEL, we perform a rigorous completeness and reliability study to estimate the true number of planets orbiting our sample of 3,262 M-dwarf stars. After correcting for the geometric transit probability and the window function of the Kepler mission, we calculate occurrence rates for planets with radii 2 - 43 R⊕ and orbital periods 1 - 10,000 days, obtaining a total rate of about 10.0 ± 5.11 planets per M-dwarf star. The vast majority of these planets likely lie in bins of small radius and long periods, implying highly efficient planet formation out to at least 5 AU from the host star. For planets with periods 1 - 1,000 days, our results of 1.77 ± 0.55 planets per M-dwarf are in good agreement with contemporary values, and qualitative agreement with predictions from other detection methods

On the Importance of Being Flexible: Dynamic Brain Networks and Their Potential Functional Significances

In this theoretical review, we begin by discussing brains and minds from a dynamical systems perspective, and then go on to describe methods for characterizing the flexibility of dynamic networks. We discuss how varying degrees and kinds of flexibility may be adaptive (or maladaptive) in different contexts, specifically focusing on measures related to either more disjoint or cohesive dynamics. While disjointed flexibility may be useful for assessing neural entropy, cohesive flexibility may potentially serve as a proxy for self-organized criticality as a fundamental property enabling adaptive behavior in complex systems. Particular attention is given to recent studies in which flexibility methods have been used to investigate neurological and cognitive maturation, as well as the breakdown of conscious processing under varying levels of anesthesia. We further discuss how these findings and methods might be contextualized within the Free Energy Principle with respect to the fundamentals of brain organization and biological functioning more generally, and describe potential methodological advances from this paradigm. Finally, with relevance to computational psychiatry, we propose a research program for obtaining a better understanding of ways that dynamic networks may relate to different forms of psychological flexibility, which may be the single most important factor for ensuring human flourishing.Peer Reviewe